Re: Phys.org California dairy virus

On 9/28/2024 8:58 AM, RonO wrote:

On 9/27/2024 3:26 PM, RonO wrote:

On 9/26/2024 6:43 PM, RonO wrote:

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-bird-flu-outbreaks-california-dairy.html
>
This Phys.org article has the most information on the Calif. situation. It was written earlier this week and has the old number of 34 infected herds (it was actually 36 listed at the USDA site) but now 6 more herds were added yesterday so the situation is even worse than they describe in this article.
>
California is doing a better job of detecting herds at this time than other states because they claim to be tracing contacts and testing herds that share workers and equipment with infected herds.  That seems to be the reason that they are detecting so many herds, and they are detecting them before the herds show signs of infection.  It has been known for a long time that dairy workers were likely spreading the virus from farm to farm, but the USDA and CDC have been in deep denial, and refused to do contact tracing to demonstrate that they were wrong.
>
This article claims that Calif. has evidence that cattle were illicitly brought back into Calif. from Idaho, but that doesn't make sense because the virus is closest in sequence to Colorado, and Idaho was infected before Colorado.  The Colorado virus is most closely related to the virus isolated from a Michigan dairy worker, so Colorado likely was infected from Michigan (my guess the Colorado virus was transmitted by a migrant infected dairy worker from Michigan because Michigan should not have been exporting cattle at that time due to USDA restrictions).  It will all be worked out once they do a phylogenetic assay of all the infected states.
>
They still are refusing to test dairy workers, but they are trying to quarantine the farms and not allowing workers to move from an infected farm to other farms.
>
Ron Okimoto
>

>
In today's update the CDC has announced that 4 more Missouri health care workers that had contact with the hospitalized patient exhibited respiratory symptoms and they are being tested for H5 antibodies.
>
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/h5n1-response-09272024.html
>
They should also test for N1 antibodies because they know that the Missouri case had a virus with 2 amino acid substitutions in the H5 gene that researchers are claiming reduces H5 antibody neutralization by 10 to 100 fold, so H5 antibodies may not be the best to test for in Missouri.
>
The USDA is also listing another herd in California identified after the 6 earlier this week bringing this weeks total to 7 in California.
>
Ron Okimoto

 The CDC is acting like creationist scam artists.  In their latest update on the dairy H5N1 influenza they emphasize "To date, only one case of influenza A(H5N1) has been detected in Missouri. No contacts of that case have tested positive for influenza A(H5N1)." even though they know that more contacts of the Missouri patient have exhibited symptoms. They know that 6 contacts have had symptoms, but only one of them were tested, and that is the reason that no contacts have tested positive.
 https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/h5n1-response-09272024.html
 Missouri should start testing their Dairy herds.  They already know that poultry farms have gone down with the virus in Missouri, and they know that poultry farms get the virus from dairies, most likely by dairy workers or their close contacts also working on the poultry farms.  They have to start a program like they have in California where they are testing dairies that have dairy workers in common with infected dairies.   California is currently identifying the most infected dairies.  It has been pretty obvious that dairy workers have been spreading the virus, but the CDC and USDA keep claiming that there isn't any evidence because they refused to start contact tracing like California.  California isn't even testing the dairy workers.  They are just assuming that they can transmit the virus, and determining that the workers are doing that by the infected dairies that they are detecting before the herds start showing symptoms.
 Ron Okimoto

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/10/03/bird-flu-human-transmission-missouri-h5n1/
This Washington post article claims that the blood samples of the 6 medical personnel that exhibited symptoms after exposure to the Missouri dairy virus patient only arrived in Georgia this week, and it will take some time to do the testing because the CDC wants to grow up the virus first.  Initial claims were that they did not get virus from the patient, and only fragmentary sequence, so what virus are they growing up?
They also have to consider previous work on the H5N1 virus that found that infected human inidviduals did not have to produce neutralizing antibodies to H5, but some H5 antibodies could be detected in their blood.  So if they do the neutralizing test that they did on the Michigan samples that were negative they could be missing infections. The Missouri virus also has 2 amino acid substitutions in the H5 gene that are claimed to reduce H5 neutralizing antibody effectiveness 10 to 100 fold.
This article repeats the claim that the patient did not have the usual influenza symptoms so likely did not transmit the virus to the medical workers.  If you look up the old papers on the Asian H5N1 infections that were killing 50% of the infected, diarrhea is one of the symptoms exhibited by infected humans as well as conjunctiva (eye infection) also associated with the dairy virus.  The CDC not disclosing that the patient had symptoms that had been associated with the high mortality H5N1 virus in Asia is not something that should be tolerated.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1865597/
QUOTE:
In humans, the possibility of intestinal infection is supported by reports of H5N1-infected patients who presented with diarrhea as the only initial symptom as well as by patients who reported consumption of raw duck blood as the sole exposure to poultry (3, 8, 39). In addition, the presence of infectious virus in fecal material may indicate virus replication in the human gastrointestinal tract (39, 40, 240).
END QUOTE:
If I remember newspaper accounts of H5N1 Asian patients with these symptoms someone at the CDC should remember the symptoms associated with the H5N1 influenza virus.  Most of the patients did exhibit upper respiratory infections, but some of the Asian patients had the symptoms exhibited by the Missouri patient.
Ron Okimoto